


One Learns By Doing

by whatsinausername



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (except Cisco's a dum-dum and doesn't know it), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, First Kiss, Flash writers hit me the FUCk up, Fluff, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Jesse ships it, Jesse's also bi it runs in the family, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Speed Force, Time Travel, also all the science in here is bullshit but what else would you expect, whatever happens in 5x03 at least I'll still have this, yeah I saw the promo but Cisco is NOT gonna die if I have anything to say about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-05 13:56:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16368881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsinausername/pseuds/whatsinausername
Summary: When he gets stabbed through the chest (again), Cisco has only seconds to save himself. So, without really thinking about it, he breaches to Earth-2 -- and Harry. But now his powers are gone, and Harry's post-Thinking-Cap brain can't help him, so Cisco is stuck. And he might have to break all the rules if he ever wants to get back home.





	1. Let's Get a Little Crazy Here

**Author's Note:**

> I've loved this show since day one, but I only recently discovered the wonderful world of Harrisco, which, duh. How did that never fucking occur to me. But I'm all aboard this ship now, so strap the heck in.

So Cisco got stabbed through the heart. Again.

Dimly, he registered that it felt different, this time. Thawne’s phasing hand had just made everything… stop. Suddenly, stillness and darkness, and that was it. But Cicada’s dagger -- well, it was a dagger, regardless of how impossibly full of dark matter it was, and so Cisco _felt_ it _tear through him_. Felt his insides _breaking_ , fiber by fiber.

But then, even through the pain and the fuzziness tugging at the edges of his vision, Cisco felt something else.

The dark energy.

The dagger was killing him, but it was also leaching the energy it had stolen from him back into his veins. Cisco felt it the blue light building in him, felt it about to burst out of his hands, almost like a breach --

no not _like_ a breach, a _breach_ \--

 _yes take me away take me anywhere take me where all this shit can’t get to me anymore_ \--

And then Cisco was falling.

And then he landed, right on his stab wound. And suddenly, stillness and darkness.

\---

Beeping.

Just a quiet, steady beeping.

 _Caitlin’s med lab. Good. She’ll have fixed me right up. Whatever’s -- wrong with me_ \--

And it all came rushing back.

 _Oh._

Absolutely everything hurt, once Cisco remembered why. His chest and back were the featured players, but every part of his body was singing backup in this chorus of pain. 

He tried to make a sound. Something like a “Rrrrrmmmmah” came out. No good. He tried to wiggle his toes. He could do it, at least. It still hurt. There was nothing for it; he would have to try to open his eyes.

So he did it. They were nasty and crusty, but he did it. And subsequently, he realized that he was definitely _not_ in Caitlin’s med lab.

It was some kind of doctor’s office, that was for sure, but the walls and window hangings -- there was a window, that clinched it, through which what looked like early morning sunlight was trickling -- were all in cream and soft pink instead of white and steel blue. And the bed was softer. And the hospital gown (under which he could see, oh boy, just a _lot_ of bandages around his torso) was cuter. _Sorry, Caitlin_.

It took a lot of effort to turn his head, but Cisco groaned through the pain until he could see out the window and _yup_ , that wasn’t Earth out there. Not Earth-1, anyway. Earth-2, if he was remembering correctly --

Cisco’s heart skipped a beat. _Earth-2. Which means_ \--

He turned his head the other way, faster this time, too fast, but he barely noticed the spike in pain because yeah. There was Harry. 

He was asleep in the chair a few feet from Cisco’s bed, snoring gently with his head lolled to one side and his glasses slipping precariously down his nose. Had Cisco had full use of his body, he would have had to fight back the urge to push them back up. But he didn’t, so he didn’t. Dumb thought, anyway.

Instead, Cisco whispered, “Harry.”

With an ugly snort, Harry startled awake, as light a sleeper as ever. How many times had he dozed off working on some gadget in the middle of the night at S.T.A.R. Labs, only to jerk back to attention if Cisco so much as crunched a potato chip? And he would always be annoyed, as if it was _Cisco’s_ fault his brain was so busy it couldn’t even quiet down while he slept.

But this time, he didn’t look annoyed. In fact, he looked the opposite of annoyed ( _tender_ , said another dumb thought in Cisco’s head) as he scrambled to his feet and over to Cisco’s bedside.

“Cisco,” he murmured, his voice sounding extra raspy for some reason. “You’re awake.”

“Yeah,” Cisco said, blinking stupidly in the face of some very intense, direct eye contact. Harry’s eyes were so blue. “Yeah, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately? Are you in pain, should I call the --”

“Yeah, I mean I did get _stabbed,_ so if they could reload my supply of whatever killer Earth-2 pain meds I _know_ you guys have got --”

“Of course.” Harry hit a button on the side of the bed, then went right back to staring uncomfortably right into Cisco’s eyes. “What _happened,_ Ramon?”

“Getting right down to it, huh?”

“I need to --”

“No ‘What’s up, Ramon, it’s been a few weeks, it’s super nice to see you even though the last time we saw each other it was a big dramatic good-bye-forever type situation--’”

“Cisco.” Harry took his hand in both of his. “I need to know who did this to you, because not knowing has been killing me. All night.”

 _Oh._

“Well.” Cisco swallowed, hard. Harry’s eyes looked weirdly… wet. “I got. Stabbed.”

“Yes, yes, by who?”

“Um, Cicada? New guy, you don’t know him. He’s got a dark matter lightning dagger that steals metas’ powers.”

Harry blinked, speechless for moment. His grip on Cisco’s hand tightened a bit.

“Yeah,” Cisco said, trying and probably failing to smile casually.

Harry’s eyebrows furrowed. “How did you breach here, if the dagger steals powers?”

“I have no idea, Harry. It all happened really fast. It felt like -- it felt like _maybe_ I absorbed some of the dagger’s dark energy, and used that for one last vibe, but… can dark matter even work like that?”

“ _I_ don’t know, Ramon.” Harry’s eyebrows did something else. Something a little sad. 

“Fuck. Right. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

 _Change the subject change the subject change the subject_ \--

“Harry?” Cisco frowned. “How did I get here? Like, what happened when I breached?”

Harry sighed, long and tired. “The breach opened and you fell, literally, at my feet. And the breach closed, and you were unconscious and you were bleeding so much, and I didn’t know what to do…” He looked even sadder. Cisco wasn’t used to seeing Harry sad, and not covering it up with anger or action. “Luckily, Jesse thought quickly, and she took you here, to the hospital. Took us both, actually. And they, you know. Fixed you up.”

Cisco looked down at his bandages again. “Your Earth-2 doctors must be pretty great. I didn’t think I was coming back from a dark-matter dagger to the heart.”

“Yes, well, apparently it missed your heart by a few millimeters. So.”

Harry smiled a little, which softened most of the sadness out of his face. Cisco realized he was smiling, too. And also that Harry was still holding his hand, and that it didn’t feel weird, exactly. New, maybe, but not weird, and also not actually new, when Cisco thought back to the last time they had seen each other. Wrath of Khan references, brief hand-holding. That had happened.

They were both quiet for a moment. And then Harry looked down at their hands and frowned again.

“Listen,” he said, “why did you breach here? Why not to S.T.A.R. Labs, or -- or to your family or --”

“Um.” Cisco strained to remember the moment he had opened the breach. “I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking. Other than, like, ‘get me somewhere safe.’ You know?”

Harry’s eyes crinkled softly for a second. But the not-quite-smile was quickly replaced with another frown. “Alright. But, Ramon… we don’t have a way to breach you back.”

_What?_

“But, Harry, the effects of the dagger are temporary, I should have my powers back soon --”

“No, Cisco. The doctors did all sorts of scans, including for the dark matter that I told them world be in your system.”

 _But_ \--

“You don’t have any. You didn’t register as a meta at all.”

_Oh._

\---

Earth-2 cars were very quiet. Perfect electric motors, and all that. So, as Harry drove Cisco home from the hospital a week later, Cisco felt an urge to try to fill the silence with conversation.

“What about any of your old S.T.A.R. Labs tech --”

“No.”

“What about any of the metahumans you’ve got here --”

“Shh.”

“God, Harry, listen to me --”

“Cisco.” Harry turned to look at him from the driver’s seat, which was not so much a driver’s seat as a supervisor-of-the-self-driving-AI seat, and smiled gently. “I want to listen to you. But I also want you not to think too hard about this while you’re still recovering, because as soon as you start thinking, you’re going to want to start _doing_.”

Cisco had nothing to refute that, so he settled for crossing his arms ( _carefully_ ) and making a pouty face.

“Fine,” he said. “But you better have learned to cook since you got back, because it’s gonna take a lot of soup to shut me up.”

Harry actually laughed, full and happy. It was a pretty great sound.

\---

Harry _had_ learned to cook, it turned out -- at least, partially. With his scientific intelligence gone and his days entirely free, Harry had taken to trying out a new hobby every other day, Jesse explained softly to Cisco as she assisted him up the front steps of the Wells house. And as they went in through the front door, Cisco saw what she was talking about.

Well, first he saw that Harry and Jesse’s home was smaller and simpler than he had expected. Like, still pretty nice and pretty bougie, but not the mansion or castle Cisco had been expecting. There was a small foyer, past which he could see the kitchen, which had pots and pans and casserole dishes on every surface, and the living room, in which Cisco could see about five easels and what looked like an overturned knitting basket.

_Still Harry._

Cisco opened his mouth to say something about Bob Ross and how if this Earth didn’t have one Harry should consider taking up the mantle, but was interrupted by Harry placing a hand on his shoulder as he blustered past into the kitchen. The familiar touch shut Cisco up for a second, and he watched silently from the kitchen doorway as Harry moved around like a tornado, banging open cabinets and clattering pot lids and spice jars.

“Whatcha doing, Dad?” Jesse asked, a note of amusement in her voice. 

Harry didn’t answer; his head was deep inside the fridge.

“ _Dad_ , I’d like to know what the chances are I’m gonna have to put out another fire --”

“Soup, obviously,” Harry grunted into the crisper drawer. “Cisco said he wanted…”

Jesse turned to look at Cisco, eyebrows raised and some kind of inscrutable smile playing at her mouth.

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “What kind of soup, specifically, Cisco?”

“Um, I didn't --”

“Broccoli cheddar,” Harry interrupted, emerging from the fridge with half an onion in his hand. He made brief eye contact with Cisco. “Right?”

Cisco couldn’t stop himself from smiling. Harry still remembered plenty of things. “Yeah. Like at Panera Bread.”

Jesse chuckled a little, then took Cisco’s arm and steered him gently out of the kitchen. “Come on, I’ll show you the room we’ve got set up for you. Then we can come back and do damage control.”

“I can follow a recipe, Jesse!” Harry called after them.

The guest room on the second floor was as comfy-looking and tastefully furnished as the rest of the house, not to mention almost as big as Cisco’s whole studio apartment back home. The room hadn’t fully escaped the encroachment of Harry’s hobbies, though.

“Is that a _telescope?_ ” Cisco said, making an educated guess as to what the nearly ceiling-high, vaguely cylindrical contraption standing in the middle of the room was.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Jesse said. “About that.”

And she flipped a switch that Cisco had very reasonably assumed was a light switch, except of course it wasn’t. Cisco had to brace himself on the doorway to keep from falling over in surprise as the ceiling and the topmost section of the wall across from him just -- disappeared. Or, no, turned transparent, he realized, to give the telescope a fairly broad section of the sky to look at.

“Whoa,” Cisco muttered, releasing the door frame to step into the room and stare up at the clouds. “Is that some kinda… selectively refractive fiberglass, I’m guessing?”

“Bingo,” Jesse said. “Run an electric current through it and it phase-shifts to let light through perfectly. Dad built this a while ago, actually, in this room specifically because the outside wall points away from the city and all the light pollution. He still likes to come in here, even if he doesn’t, you know, remember all the names of the nebulas or whatever.”

Something a little sad came over her face, and she turned away from him to turn the ceiling back on.

“Um, Jesse?” Cisco said, unable to avoid the question any longer. “Is he okay? Are you okay? With the -- the everything, and everything?”

Jesse huffed out a not-quite laugh. “Yeah, Cisco. We’re fine.”

“You sure?”

Jesse went and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at her hands. Cisco sat next to her ( _carefully_ ) and tried to put on his supportive face.

“Really, things are good. Better, in a lot of ways, because he’s not always at the lab or overthinking things, and he’s better at talking about his feelings and stuff.”

“But?”

“But he still…” Jesse sighed, and looked up at the ceiling as if she could still see the stars there. “He’s still acting like he lost something and he’s trying not to think about it, you know? Like, he can’t ever not be doing something, and it’s great that he’s opening up and trying all these new things, but… he’s sad, Cisco. And I don’t think there’s anything _I_ can do about it.”

Cisco opened his mouth, trying to think of something calming and solution-adjacent to say, but he got stuck on that weirdly emphasized I (as if someone else _could_ do something about it), so nothing came out.

But Jesse smiled and shook her head, which was some advanced-level mixed messaging, and patted Cisco’s shoulder. “Why don’t you lie down for a bit. I’ll come get you when the soup is ready. Whatever that ends up looking like.”

\---

It was impossible for Cisco to follow Jesse’s instructions, however, once the smell of sauteed onions and melty cheese started wafting up the stairs half an hour later. 

_Sorry, Jesse,_ Cisco thought as he made his way slowly down the stairs. _Sorry, body._

He paused in the kitchen doorway for a moment, taking advantage of the chance to see Harry in his _zone_ before disturbing him with his presence. Harry at work had always been a thing to behold, and the Thinking Cap hadn’t changed that. His focus, his intensity, the way his hands moved like a pianist playing what he thought might be his last concerto -- that was all still there. The fact that it was now being applied to chopping broccoli instead of building cerebral inhibitors… well, that wasn’t a loss, not really. 

Cisco was snapped out of his thoughts by Harry turning and locking eyes with him. “Hi, Ramon,” he said, not pausing his knife work for even a second. “Been spying on me long?”

“No,” Cisco said, stepping into the kitchen and leaning ( _carefully_ ) on the island countertop that stood between him and Harry next to the stove. “I was just thinking that, judging by that smell, your soup-y skills are gonna be just as good a contribution to the world as your particle accelerator-y ones. Better, even.”

Harry chuckled and dumped a handful of broccoli into a steaming pot. “Did Jesse tell you to say that?”

 _Whoops_. “Ha, uh,” Cisco stuttered, “no? No.”

Harry fixed him with another piercing stare.

“Yes,” Cisco admitted. “She said you’ve been --”

“-- sad about the Thinking Cap incident? I know what Jesse thinks.” 

“Harry, it would be perfectly understandable if you did feel, you know, some normal human emotions about this --”

Harry brushed his hands off and then turned to lean against the other side of the island, so that their faces weren’t actually very far apart and Cisco could see the red, sunsetting light reflecting in his eyes. “Cisco,” he said, a little softer, “I can promise you that I am not secretly depressed about losing my intellect.”

“You sure about that?” Cisco said, noticing his breathing was a little shallower ( _stupid stab wound_ ). “Jesse said -- she said you were acting like you lost something.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed. Not in a mean, about-to-say-something-rude way, in a -- well, Cisco didn’t have time to figure out what way, because it only lasted a second before Harry cleared his throat and turned back to the stove to stir the soup. 

“I’m fine, Ramon,” he said, at normal volume. “If anything, I’ve been worried about my friend who recently got _stabbed_.”

“Oh, yeah, sounds rough.” Cisco laughed, exhaling a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “How’s he doing?”

“Well enough to bother me while I’m busy in the kitchen, apparently. Hand me the red pepper flakes?”

“How would I know where your red pepper flakes are, Harry?”

“If you looked an inch to the left of where you’re standing --”

“Yeah, yeah, I see them.” 

Cisco grabbed the jar and moved around the island to stand next to Harry. He ignored Harry’s outstretched hand, dumped a huge measure of pepper in himself, and relished the way Harry’s eyes widened in horror.

“Bam!” he said, with all the appropriate force and wrist flourishing. Harry’s eyebrows went back down in confusion. 

“C’mon, do you guys not have Emeril?” Cisco asked, aghast.

“What, the _Joy of Painting_ guy?”

“Oh my _God_.”

\---

That night, full of warm cheese and feeling truly cozy for the first time since arriving on Earth-2, Cisco decided to sleep with the ceiling off. It was wild, laying in bed under what looked like the open sky, watching the stars slowly turn. The constellations here were just different enough to be weird -- he found Cassiopeia but not Pegasus, and Orion was there but had one of his arms missing, or maybe pointing in a different direction -- and Cisco found himself wondering if Harry still knew enough to at least tell him their names. 

Cisco knew he should be worrying about how to get home, and about the mysterious loss of his powers. But as he remembered those last moments before his last breach --

 _take me where all this shit can’t get to me anymore_ \--

Of course he wanted to go home. Of course he did. But for now he needed rest, on literally the doctor’s orders. And it was hard to want to go back to Cicada and his pro-stabbing worldview when here he had soup, and stars, and Harry.

 _And Jesse,_ Cisco reminded himself, as he rolled over ( _carefully_ ) and thought, for some reason, about the way Harry’s eyes had looked as the sunset streamed into the kitchen. Probably because the moon was rising into his ceiling. Sunset, moonrise -- simple word association.

Dumb thought, anyway.


	2. Turn It All Off

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, 5x03 is over and my darling boy is fine in canon. But over here in AU Land, things are starting to get real.
> 
> (And real gay.)

“Ramon. You’re up early.”

“Yeah, well, if you want me to sleep in, you’re either gonna have to not make the house smell this good in the morning or you’re gonna have to lock the guest room from the outside.”

Harry held out a mug of coffee (already cream-two-sugars-ed, Cisco noticed gratefully) and squinted. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and he had some unshaven morning scruff around his jaw ( _Not a bad look,_ Cisco caught himself thinking, weirdly). “Did your pain wake you up?”

Cisco shrugged ( _carefully_ ) and cupped the mug in front of his face so he could huff the coffee steam. “I mean, maybe. A little. I do miss my IV drip, let me tell you. But,” he cut over Harry, who had taken in one of his big arguing breaths, “I took my pills as soon as I got up, and now I feel fine, relatively speaking. So no need to give me the lecture on taking my medications, Doctor Wells.”

“Alright.” Harry turned back to the stove to flip the French toast. “But, for the record, I wasn’t going to lecture you. I was going to say we could call and get your prescription adjusted if you need a higher dose.”

Oh boy. There it was again. He had to say something. Cisco took a sip of _whoops_ still-scalding coffee to steel himself, then padded around the island to lean against the counter facing Harry.

“Harry,” he said, his voice coming out a little softer than he had maybe intended, “you don’t have to worry about taking care of me.”

Harry put down his spatula, suddenly and probably a little harder than he had intended, so that both of them jumped when it clattered and skid across the countertop.

“You were dying! In my arms, Cisco, you were…”

Harry took a deep breath and flexed his fingers.

“I do have to worry,” he said hoarsely. “I mean, I want to.”

He gripped the edge of the counter, still facing away from Cisco. Not knowing what else to do, Cisco put down his coffee and placed a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry relaxed a little at his touch but didn’t look at him.

“Cisco,” he said, in almost a whisper, “I know you can take care of yourself. Trust me, I have no illusions on that front. But…” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I’m kind of all you’ve got here on this Earth. And I have some idea of how that must feel, because you were all I had on yours.”

Harry finally looked at Cisco then, and before he knew what he was doing Cisco had wrapped his arms around Harry’s middle and pulled him into a hug. Harry froze for a second, maybe from surprise or maybe because he didn’t want to hurt Cisco, but then he put his arms around Cisco too and squeezed, very gently. 

“Okay,” Cisco murmured. He wasn’t sure what he was okaying, exactly, but Harry seemed to get the message. 

They stayed like that for a long time. Cisco rested his head against Harry’s shoulder and listened to the faint beating of his heart. At one point, one of Harry’s hands came up to rest in Cisco’s hair. 

“I like Emotionally Intelligent Harry,” Cisco finally mumbled into Harry’s shirt.

Harry chuckled softly. “He likes you too.”

Then he drew back a little, keeping his hands on Cisco’s upper arms, and looked down at him but didn’t quite make eye contact. 

“Cisco --”

“Morning, guys!”

Cisco and Harry flew apart, Harry scrambling for the spatula and Cisco lunging for his coffee so he could sip it while leaning casually against the island. A second later, it occurred to him that there was no _reason_ for him and Harry to have acted like they’d just been caught, like, negotiating a weed deal or something. Nothing weird had been going on.

( _Right?_ )

But if Jesse thought their behavior was suspicious, she didn’t show it as she bounded into the kitchen and kissed Harry on the cheek. ( _Scruffy,_ Cisco again caught himself thinking before he could stop himself.)

“So, Cisco, I was thinking,” she said, snatching a piece of French toast from the plate where Harry had been stacking them neatly, “our S.T.A.R. Labs is closed down in all but name. But if my team and I got you the supplies, would you be able to make another one of your interdimensional extrapolators at our headquarters?”

Harry shot Jesse a glare, whether because she was eating with her bare hands or because she was violating his “no thinking until Cisco’s recovered” rule Cisco couldn’t tell, but visibly stopped himself from saying anything.

“Yeah, for sure,” Cisco replied.

“Cool, what do you need?” Jesse asked around a monster bite of French toast.

“A few ounces of a non-reactive metal, platinum if you’ve got it.” Cisco bit down a laugh as he watched Harry’s face get pink from the effort of not shutting down their scheming. “And a miniature subatomic transmission engine, if you’ve got one --”

“Of course --”

“-- and I hope you’ve got a particle sauter at your lab, because --”

“Has it occurred to either of you,” Harry interrupted, “that the extrapolator would get Cisco home but not give him his powers back?”

Cisco and Jesse just stared at him, shocked into silence by the suddenness and correctness of his outburst.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Harry said, waving the spatula at them grumpily. “I can still, you know. Contribute.”

“I didn’t doubt it,” Cisco heard himself saying. Harry looked at him, and a smile twitched around his eyes, and Cisco took a giant swig of coffee to distract himself from the responding lurch in his gut region.

“Oh, duh, of course you’re right, Dad,” Jesse said, snapping out of her surprise. “We’ll have to think of something else, then. If we could possibly scavenge a plutonic reactor from the old particle accelerator --”

“Or we could just go with the extrapolator,” Cisco said into his mug.

It was his turn to get stared at by the other two. 

“Just a… thought.”

Both Wellses started talking at once. It was a sight to behold.

“Ramon, if it’s time you’re worried about --”

“My team and I are totally up to the task of --”

“-- you can stay here as long as you need, you don’t have to --”

“-- we may not be Team Flash but --”

“ _Maybe I don’t want to get my powers back, alright?_ ”

In what seemed to be a growing trend, the words were out before Cisco could fully consider how very bad a thing they would be to say. And sure enough, Jesse and Harry fell silent again, for a lot longer this time. The shocked hurt on Jesse’s face was nearly unbearable. And the pained sympathy on Harry’s -- well, there was nothing _nearly_ about it.

So Cisco gently put his hall-full coffee mug on the counter. And then he ran ( _ow, ow, carefully_ ) out of the room.

\---

Time moved differently during a good sulk, so Cisco wasn’t sure how long it took Harry to follow him up to the guest room. It couldn’t have been that long, though, because the slice of French toast that Harry silently handed him before perching on the edge of the bed was still warm. Still steaming, actually, as Cisco found out when he tore it in half and scarfed down a whole chunk without bothering to sit up.

“Damn, Harry,” he muttered with his mouth full. “That’s some good French toast.”

Harry smiled, but it quickly dropped back into a pity frown. “Ramon --”

“I know, I know.” He stuffed the other half of the bread in his mouth. “M’sorry.”

“You don’t have to be _sorry_ \--”

“Yeah, no, that’s not -- I’m not sorry for feeling it, I’m sorry for being a jerkass about it.”

Harry nodded. He looked down at Cisco -- and it was such an awkward angle, Cisco realized, him lying down and Harry sitting and twisting so they could kind of make eye contact. So he threw caution to the wind.

“Can you just -- you can lie down next to me,” he said, in what he hoped was an extremely casual tone of voice. “I don’t wanna sit up, and it’ll be -- we’ll both be more comfortable…”

Harry’s face softened, and he nodded and crawled in next to Cisco, obviously trying not to jostle the bed too much. And then they were both lying on their sides, face-to-face, and it was all suddenly kind of _a lot_ \--

“Um,” Cisco said, partly because Harry looked like he was waiting for him to talk and partly to drown out the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, “you remember how I said that when I breached, all I could think was how bad I wanted to be somewhere safe?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Well, I… I haven’t felt safe in years, Harry. Not since Thawne, and _definitely_ not since getting my powers. And lately, with this metahuman serial killer on the loose and my powers on the fritz, I guess I’ve been thinking” -- Cisco swallowed, hard -- “and now being here, with no super shenanigans to worry about, and -- and seeing you having your normal-ass life with your soup and your French toast, I --”

Cisco’s throat seized up for a second. He felt tears threatening. And Harry apparently saw the signs, too, because he reached out and wrapped Cisco up in his arms again, and _God_ it felt good to just snuggle up into Harry’s chest and cry into his soft t-shirt.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Harry whispered, reaching up to run one hand ran softly over Cisco’s hair, “with being tired.”

Cisco sniffed. “Is that why you left?”

“It’s one of the reasons. That, and my diminished intellect, and needing to spend more time with Jesse, and --”

“And what?”

“Nothing.”

The hand in Cisco’s hair stopped moving, and Harry showed every sign of being about to pull away suddenly. But Cisco nuzzled in even closer, and Harry relaxed again.

“It’s okay,” Cisco said. “Thank you for saying that.”

Harry combed his hand through Cisco’s hair again, his fingertips brushing his scalp, and Cisco had to bite back an actual groan, that’s how nice it felt.

“Cisco,” Harry said, his voice barely more than a grumbly whisper, “you can stay here as long as you need. You’re… we’re family, after all. And it’s good. Good to have you here.”

Cisco didn’t trust himself to respond to that without breaking into full-fledged ugly sobs,

They laid there for a long time, Harry touching Cisco’s hair and Cisco curled up into him, the clouds skidding across the ceiling in the autumn wind. And it was as he listened to Harry’s breathing growing slower and deeper, and felt himself drifting off to a doze as well, that Cisco finally let himself admit what the tumbles in his stomach and the tingles over his skin meant. That feeling had always been there, at least a little, when he was with Harry; it was why he had breached here, of all the places in the multiverse, even when his dying mind couldn’t form any kind of a conscious thought; and it was why, right now, he couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.

But acknowledging the feeling didn’t change the fact that there was nothing he could do about it. There had never been anything to do about it. There was no way Harry -- Cisco was so much younger, and from a different Earth, and Harry’s heart was so full of Jesse and his dead wife -- there was no way. And Cisco had known that for a long time.

So he sighed, and decided to appreciate this moment, this version of Harry that wanted to take care of him, for whatever it was. And he let himself slip off to sleep, wrapped in Harry’s warmth and full of the French-toasty smell of him.

\---

Cisco opened his eyes groggily.

Why. Why was he awake. Had something --

Someone cleared their throat, loudly, from the other side of the room. _Aha._

Cisco poked his head up, groundhog-like, to see over Harry’s prone torso and yup, there was Jesse, standing in the doorway with a truly indecent expression of amusement on her face.

Harry snorted awake, too, and blinked rapidly as he raised his eyes to look at Cisco, then twisted around towards the door.

“Jesse?” he grumbled. “What is it?”

“Sorry to, uh, wake you guys up,” Jesse said as she strode into the room, not sounding sorry at all, “but I brought something back from headquarters.” She held up something that looked, for all the world, like Geordi’s VISOR from _Next Generation_. “Cisco, this is a psychoencephalograph. It should tell us if there’s any remnants of your Vibe powers left.”

Cisco and Harry both opened their mouths to argue, but Jesse cut them off. “I know you said you might not want your powers back, and I’m not gonna fight you on that,” she said. “But don’t you want to know if there’s a chance they might reassert themselves? Or, shit, if the dagger did some kind of damage that’s worse than we realize?”

Cisco sighed. He couldn’t argue with that.

“Fine.” He sat up ( _carefully_ ), and Harry did too. “VISOR me up, Scotty.” 

Lord, he was so emotionally exhausted he was mixing his _Star Trek_ metaphors.

Jesse bent and placed the VISOR over his eyes. “Try not to blink too much.”

Cisco’s eyes watered with the effort of it as the thing blasted white light into his eyeballs. Over the edge of it, he saw Jesse take a small tablet out from an inside pocket of her jacket and tap its screen a few times. The tablet beeped, the VISOR beeped, and then there was a holographic projection of Cisco’s brain floating up from the tablet’s screen.

“Oh, look,” Cisco said weakly, “my puny mind.” _There we go. Still got it._

Harry snorted out a charitable laugh, but Jesse ignored him, poking at the hologram with her fingers. Cisco could see what looked like fairly regular brain activity throughout most of his lobes. Until, that is, Jesse pinched her fingers and zoomed in on his brain stem.

“Whoa,” she said --

_Goddamnit,_ Cisco thought --

Because there, swirling around his hindbrain, were twisting tendrils of bright blue energy. Just like the light from a breach.

Cisco ripped the VISOR off and pushed off the bed to pace across the room.

“Cisco,” Jesse said with something of a plead in her voice, “you’ve still got a psychic link to the dimensional energy of the multiverse.”

Cisco pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, still pacing. “Yeah, I know.”

“I know you said you didn’t want to pursue it, but I think --”

“Jesse,” Harry growled, “don’t --”

“ _Everybody shush!_ ”

Harry and Jesse shut up. For a second, Cisco worried that he had hurt their feelings again. But quickly, a look of recognition spread across Harry’s face, and he nodded encouragingly -- he knew what it looked like when Cisco was thinking harder than ever.

Cisco kept pacing back and forth in front of the two Wellses, and their eyes followed him like he was a tennis ball. “If the dagger didn’t kill my psychic link,” he said, “then that means it just affected my metahuman physiology.”

Jesse furrowed her brow. “Meaning, what, it basically just sucked all the dark matter out of your DNA?”

“Gotta be something like that, right?” He stared absentmindedly up at the blue afternoon sky in the ceiling. “Caitlin would know for sure.” 

_Caitlin. And the others._

And a sinking feeling filled Cisco’s chest, replacing all that cozy contentment from earlier with reminders of stuff like, ugh, _doing the right thing_ \--

“Guys,” he said, pacing faster, “if the dagger can do that, if it’s sucking up dark matter from the metas Cicada’s killing, then it’s gotta be storing it somehow, which means --”

“The dagger is a dark energy bomb,” Jesse said in an awestruck undertone.

“And Team Flash,” Harry said, “is in more danger than they realize.”

“Okay, so if that’s the case…” Jesse started pacing too, doing twisty things with her hands that reminded Cisco powerfully of Harry. “Then all that it should take to restore your powers is another blast of dark matter, right?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa --” Harry started.

“We’d definitely need dark matter,” Cisco cut over him, “but the dimensional energy is all in my brainstem, so we’d need --”

“-- something to draw it out into your frontal cortex, something like --”

Cisco _clapped_ his hands together as the realization dawned on him all at once --

“-- something like a co-viber,” he said. 

He and Jesse faced each other across the room, both breathing a little heavier. 

“I, uh, did it with Cynthia,” Cisco said, suddenly very aware of Harry’s eyes on him and how badly he wanted _not_ to meet them. “It amplified both our powers, so --”

“But we don’t have any other vibers on this Earth, Cisco,” Jesse said. “The only one was --”

“Reverb,” Harry said.

And then Cisco did turn to meet Harry’s eyes. And if something passed between them -- an acknowledgment that Cisco had kind of just talked himself into wanting his powers back, an understanding of what kind of shit they’d have to pull to do that, a quiet realization that could be no more hiding from the world in bed together -- well, it was something to talk about later.

“Reverb’s dead, Dad,” Jesse said, not unkindly.

“I know,” Harry grunted. “So you’d probably have to run back in time to get him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and for sticking with me! Writing this made me realize how much I already miss Harry. Sherloque WHO, I just want my grumpy Earth-2 dad back.


	3. I Need My Paddles

“Oh, _hell_ no. Hell to the _ever-loving no,_ Harry!”

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose, elbows on his knees. “I didn’t say it was a good idea. Just… an idea.”

“You know,” Cisco said through gritted teeth, “you _know_ why I can’t… after Dante? Not to mention the very real possibility that any timeline fuckery would make me go all _Stranger Things_ and then vibe out of existence?”

“I _know_.” Harry stood up and took a step toward him. One side of his hair was in a truly epic bedhead situation, but there was no trace of sleep in his eyes as he looked down at Cisco. “I’m not telling you to. It just, it seemed like the logical endpoint of your train of thought. It was stupid. We’ll just have to…”

He trailed off, running a hand through his hair so that it stood up even straighter. Cisco softened immediately at the sight, like the dumbass that he was.

“Dad, maybe we don’t have to write your idea off just yet.” Jesse was still pacing, deeper in thought than ever. “What if there was a way to” -- she held her hands out in front of her like she was squeezing a basketball between them -- “ _contain_ the event, Cisco’s co-vibing with Reverb I mean, so that it had a minimal effect on the timeline?”

Cisco dragged his eyes away from Harry. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse groaned. “Maybe if I could move us fast enough, or if we could _take_ him somewhere that’s not contiguous with our timeline, like a --”

Cisco’s eyes immediately snapped back to Harry’s.

“Pocket dimension,” they said in unison.

Jesse stopped in her tracks. “I’m sorry, what? Those are just theoretical.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, was your Earth not nearly ravaged by a madman with his own mini universe for a lair?” Cisco was barely containing hysterical laughter at the irony of it all. “Yeah, pocket dimensions are a thing.”

Jesse’s eyes flicked back and forth between Cisco and her father. “You mean, Devoe had a --”

“Yup.”

“How did he access it? Did he create it or find it? Was it --”

“I don’t know, Jesse.” Cisco pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not something I ever thought to ask Marlize, I was a little busy badgering her to finish the gadget that saved your dad’s brain and brought him back to m -- us.”

_Don’t look at Harry don’t look at Harry don’t look_ \--

okay, so Cisco caved and stole a glance, and if he didn’t know any better (and boy did he _know better_ ) he would have said Harry was looking at him like, like Bill Pullman was always looking at Sandra Bullock in _While You Were Sleeping_ \--

but then Jesse cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, “I’m really smart, and you’re really smart, and my team is really smart, so I bet between us we could figure it out.”

She looked at Harry, who was staring so intensely at his feet that Cisco was sure he had imagined the Bill Pullman thing. “Um, sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to, like, exclude you or anything --”

Harry huffed out a laugh and pulled Jesse into a one-armed hug. “It’s okay, Jesse. I’m perfectly happy playing pit crew.”

\---

Harry may have been able to keep Cisco in the house and resting for the last few days of his recovery (seriously, those Earth-2 drugs were _good,_ because Cisco’s wound was healing impossibly fast), but he couldn’t reasonably stop Jesse from parking herself in the guest room and talking logistics with Cisco. She even brought in a little whiteboard with an adjustable-height stand, and they passed hours making calculations on it -- Jesse writing an equation, then swiveling and squashing the board down so Cisco could prop himself up on an elbow and add his own thoughts. By the end of a week, they had a rough outline of their plan:

One, locate a fixed pocket dimension in the Central City area.

Two, build an interdimensional extrapolator for easy access.

Three, run back in time to an inconsequential night in Reverb’s life, after the particle accelerator explosion (so Reverb would have his powers) but before his alliance with Zoom (so Cisco wouldn’t even have to think about _that_ can of timeline-shredding worms).

Four, breach Reverb into the pocket dimension, blast the pocket with dark matter from the Speed Force, very nicely ask Reverb to co-vibe with Cisco, ask a little meaner but not too mean when asking nicely doesn’t work, get Cisco’s powers back, then breach Reverb home, knock him out, and hope he thinks the whole thing was just a trippy dream.

Simple. Foolproof. Cisco got a tension headache just thinking about it.

Alright, so it wasn’t the most solid of plans. And to make his heart palpitations even worse, Harry came in and out several times a day with lunch and coffee and extra blankets, and Cisco had to fight against some deep-ass muscle memory to resist the urge to ask him to check his math. Jesse was great, but he and Harry -- they had always had a good thing going. And for all Harry’s talk of not being bitter about his lost IQ, every time he came and went he said fewer and fewer words. Classic Harry-sinking-into-a-funk symptoms.

So he asked about it, during a rare moment he stole away to watch Harry paint in the living room (and Harry was an okay painter, it turned out, even if his color palettes were a bit muted for Cisco’s taste).

“Harry,” he asked, talking with his mouth full of grilled cheese to make it sound more casual, “are you okay with me doing the science bro thing with Jesse?”

Harry didn’t look away from the tree bark he was meticulously detailing, but his mouth twitched into an almost-smile. “‘Science bros’? Is that what we were?”

“Answer the question.”

“I love that you and Jesse are getting to know each other.”

“That’s still not what I asked, you dingus.”

Harry finally straightened up and turned to look at Cisco. He had some green paint smeared across his cheek. “Are you asking me, again, if I’m still mourning the loss of my intellect?”

“Um, no.” Cisco swallowed another mouthful of sandwich. “I guess I’m more wondering if you’re, like, upset that we’re not working together anymore? Because you’re upset about _something,_ don’t even try to play.”

Harry was very close. When had he stepped closer? Cisco could see the creases around his eyes crinkling behind his glasses, and that infuriating streak of paint --

“Are you?” Harry asked, his voice suddenly soft and extra raspy in that really unfair way that made Cisco’s knees go kind of weak. “Upset that we’re not working together?”

“Well” -- Cisco lowered his grilled cheese slowly -- “yeah. I mean, it’s not like we ever did anything together besides all-night math benders. So yeah, without that, I guess I do kind of. Miss you.”

And _fuck it,_ in spite of every nerve in his body screaming at him so hard it felt like he was about to vibe, Cisco reached out and wiped the paint off Harry’s cheek with his thumb. Harry tensed up at the touch, but an expression that Cisco knew very well spread across his face -- it was the look he got when he was just _so close_ to solving for _x_ , when all the pieces of a puzzle were coming together and the answer was right on the tip of his tongue. Desperation and euphoria all at once.

“There are other things,” Harry murmured, “that we could do together.”

Cisco’s heartbeat was suddenly all he could hear.

“You mean, like, making a run to Big Belly Burger?” he said pathetically.

Harry opened his mouth, closed it, put his hands on his hips and looked down at his shifting feet.

_Holy ruining the moment, Ramon._

“Right, so, scratch that.” Cisco took a shuddering breath. “And let’s imagine I said something sensible, like ‘Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’d show me the telescope in my room and tell me about your alternate-universe constellations, because Orion’s wonky arm has been taunting me every night.’”

Harry’s smile slowly crept back. “You sleep with the ceiling on every night?”

“Off, but yeah, ‘cause --”

“If you can see the stars, it’s _on,_ because of the electric current --”

“But the ceiling itself is off, _obviously,_ because you can’t see it. Current is on, ceiling is off.”

Harry crossed his arms stubbornly. But he was still looking at Cisco _like that,_ wary and hopeful and searching, and for the first time ever, Cisco imagined leaning up and kissing Harry, and Harry not pulling away. Harry kissing him back, even. It had never seemed possible before, but now --

Well. More data was still needed.

Cisco shoved the rest of his grilled cheese into his mouth before he could do anything rash. “You know I’m right,” he said, almost incomprehensibly, then turned on his heel and practically sprinted from the living room.

“It’s a date, Ramon,” Harry called after him.

And Cisco couldn’t help but grin like a fool at that, which made him very glad he was already halfway up the stairs.

\---

But their Astronomy Appointment (as Cisco took to calling it in his head, because his body tended to do embarrassing things when he thought of it as a _date_ ) didn’t happen that night. The next day, after all, was the day Cisco was allowed to take off his bandages and start doing normal human things again, so Jesse woke him up at the butt-crack of dawn for his first official meeting with Team Quick. Harry wasn’t even awake when they left, so Jesse made the coffee. It wasn’t as good as Harry’s.

Team Quick, it turned out, were pretty chill people despite being indisputably some kind of freaky bizarro-world version of Team Flash. There was the medical expert, Matthew, who geeked out over Cisco’s brain scans in a way that made Cisco seriously tempted to ask if they happened to have any cousins named Snow; Rosalyn, the mission control lady, who had such a pre-getting-together Barry-Iris thing going on with Jesse that Cisco practically suffocated on the unresolved tension the first time he walked into a room with both women in it; Rosalyn’s mom, Nicole, who was a fire chief; and the engineer, Eric, who of course just happened to be the doppelganger of the guy who had been Cisco’s arch-nemesis at every hackathon he’d ever gone to in college. He seemed nice in this universe, though, so Cisco did his best to contain all of the sick burns he’d come up with in the years since he’d last seen Earth-1 Eric.

The days at Quick headquarters were as long as they had ever been with Team Flash. Cisco had to get there early in the morning if he wanted Jesse and Eric’s help with Operation: Revibe (Reverb, revive, re-Vibe -- alright, not his best work, but his thoughts were kind of occupied these days) before their crime-busting day started. Then, inevitably, he got roped into helping with whatever Team Quick was doing that day, and then late nights were the best time for Jesse to take their shiny new Microdimension Detector out and scan around the city for pockets without too many civilians noticing.

Harry clearly did his best to wait up for them, but most nights they came home at some ungodly hour to find him passed out on the couch and dinner in the fridge. And while Jesse seemed content to drape a blanket over her dad and call it a night, Cisco could feel himself getting twitchier every day he went without some kind of follow-up to his and Harry’s last proper conversation.

So one night, about a week into his time with Team Quick, Cisco finally sucked it up and did the thing. He ate his tupperware of beef burgundy deliberately slowly in the kitchen and waited for Jesse to go up to bed. The range of possible reactions Jesse could have to finding out that he had, oh God, _designs_ on her father? Not something Cisco was remotely ready to contemplate.

When he finally heard her feet on the staircase, Cisco put the stew back in the fridge and tiptoed into the living room. Harry was sleeping on the couch again, clutching the blanket around himself, and -- except _wait,_ Jesse had _just_ put that blanket on him, and his breathing was just a little too even --

Cisco crouched so that his face was level with Harry’s. “You’re not asleep, you shitweed.”

Harry opened his eyes and grinned. “Brilliant, Holmes.”

“What the hell, man? Do you just get off on lies and deception?”

“You and Jesse wake me up every night when you come in.” Harry stretched sleepily, his arm muscles flexing very distractingly under his thermal shirt. “You think you’re being quiet, but you sound like a couple of hippos who never learned how to shut a fridge gently.”

Cisco refocused on Harry’s face and tried not to cave _completely_ under those damn twinkly eyes. “But why do you keep pretending to be asleep,” he asked, unable to keep his own smile from creeping out, “when you could have, you know, said _hello_ like a real boy?”

“It makes Jesse happy to tuck me in.”

Cisco sighed. “Damn.” And he let himself reach out to run his fingers through Harry’s every-which-way hair. “That’s so cute I can’t pretend to be mad anymore.”

Harry’s smile softened into something warmer, and he caught Cisco’s hand in his own. Cisco would have been happy to sit there forever, probably, with Harry looking at him _like that_ and softly rubbing his thumb over his knuckles. But then he remembered why he had come in here in the first place.

“Do you want to go, like, look at stars now?”

“Absolutely.” And Harry sprang to his feet, pulling Cisco along with him.

\---

Harry’s hands remembered how to calibrate the telescope, even if his mind didn’t remember the difference between declination and right ascension or which lens was needed to view the Ring Nebula. So Cisco watched, fascinated, as he set the person-sized optical tube at an angle almost perpendicular to the floor, turned on the tracking mechanism, and screwed in the eyepiece. And then he and Harry sat cross-legged on the floor, knees just brushing together, and took turns looking through it at the stars in the ceiling.

“Alright, _please_ tell me what is up with Orion over here.”

Harry frowned, like he was trying to recall something learned in the eighth grade. “On your Earth, he’s got a shield in one hand and a sword raised in the other, right? Well, here, the shield is a bow, and his right hand is lowered to reach into his quiver.”

“Oh, his _quiver_.” Cisco wiggled his eyebrows. “Is that what you guys call his dick?”

Harry made a strangled coughing sound. “His _what?_ ”

“Come on, the three stars hanging down from his --” Cisco abandoned the eyepiece and pointed straight up, outlining the bit of the constellation he meant. “All the Earth-1 astronomy professors and physics camp counselors will tell you it’s his _sword,_ but, like. That’s a dick.”

Harry squinted through his glasses at the ceiling. “I can’t believe that never occurred to me.”

“You’re welcome. Now, whenever you look up at the night sky and see Orion’s flaccid dong, you’ll think of --”

Cisco realized what he was saying and shut his mouth, immediately grateful that the room was too dark for Harry to see how furiously he was blushing.

But Harry chuckled, softly and miraculously. “How romantic.”

Cisco took a breath and looked at him. Harry’s eyes, grayish in the starlight, were on him, too, and his lips were barely parted. If it had been anyone else in the multiverse, the “kiss me” vibes would have been unmistakeable. But this was _Harry_. And despite everything, Cisco couldn’t shake the feeling that he was crazy, that he was reading it all wrong --

“Cisco,” Harry whispered, almost like he could read his thoughts, which, actually, maybe he kind of could, “stop overthinking.”

_Alright, then._

So Cisco kissed him. And Harry kissed him back, happily and enthusiastically. They came together like magnets do, when you’re a kid and you push their repelling poles together, harder and harder, the invisible tension building until they _snap_ around, and the parts that wanted each other find each other. That’s exactly what it was like, Cisco thought deliriously, as he wound his hands in Harry’s soft hair and tugged him closer.

And then.

“Don’t go,” Harry murmured against his mouth.

Cisco pulled back a bit, holding Harry’s face between his hands. “Wait, what do you mean?”

Harry sighed a tiny sigh, and Cisco felt it on his nose. Harry reached a hand up to run a thumb along Cisco’s cheek. “Don’t go back to Earth-1,” he said.

And then.

Cisco dropped his hands. They lay slack in his lap. “How could you ask me that?” he said, his voice sounding less affronted and more pitiful than he’d intended.

“Because I want you to stay.”

“ _You_ left, Harry. Multiple times, in fact. Most recently after almost forgetting to hug me goodbye. Ringing any bells?”

And then.

“I would have stayed if you --” Harry cut himself off, squeezed his eyes shut, took a breath. “I had given up, Cisco. Given up hope that you were ever going to want me.”

_Goddamnit_.

Cisco let his face drop forward onto Harry’s shoulder. “For real, dude?”

“You and Cynthia --”

“That’s over, I thought I made that --”

“You were in love with her.”

“Yeah,” Cisco said, his voice muffled against Harry’s shirt, “and I was _also_ in love with you. It’s 2018, old man.”

Harry didn’t laugh. Cisco straightened up and saw that he was frowning against what looked like gathering tears. He took Harry’s face in his hands again.

“Harry,” he said, as softly and as seriously as he could, “I thought _you_ would never want _me_. We were both stupid, okay?”

Cisco kissed Harry’s nose, his cheek, his jaw, then wrapped his arms around his neck and pulled him as close as he could get. He felt Harry’s arms around his middle, felt Harry nestle his face into his shoulder.

“My friends need me,” Cisco whispered. “I have to go to them.”

“I know,” Harry whispered back.

“We… we can figure this shit out.” Cisco glanced up at the stars. They had moved, the way stars do. “If the timeline doesn’t eat me first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: The reason this chapter took a couple days longer than the last one is because I accidentally made Harry into such a suave motherfucker with that "there are other things we could do together line" that it shut my OWN brain down. I couldn't write for like 36 hours. If someone I was into said that to me in real life? I would absolutely spontaneously combust. I can't believe Cisco survived it.
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed this chapter! More to come soon. Thank you all for your kind comments, and for sticking with me so far!


	4. Fast Enough for You, Old Man

“Goggles on, guys!” Rosalyn said.

Cisco put on his neutron ray-filtering glasses along with the rest of Team Quick. Not that he thought they were necessary; the lab’s viewing window was reinforced against radiation, clumsy speedsters, and any number of other whoopsies. And Cisco had looked straight at the Speed Force before, anyway.

(“You _what?_ ” Matthew had spluttered.

“I mean, it was hard not to, it was a big-ass lightning tornado eating my friend --”

“Would you stare directly into the _sun_ if it was eating your friend?” they’d retorted, grabbing a retinoscope and trying to shine it into Cisco’s eyes.

“What the hell kind of question is that?” Cisco had yelled, dodging out of Matthew’s way. “Of course I would!”

In the end, he had let Matthew examine his eyes and lecture him about proper lab safety protocols, because it made them so happy, and it was impossible not to want Matthew to be happy. And also because they were the one who’d have to fix Cisco’s body in the event that Operation Revibe went terribly, horribly wrong.)

Inside the testing lab, Eric lowered the visor on his full-body protective suit that made him look like Dustin Hoffman in _Pandemic_ if he had stuffed his CDC suit with marshmallows. He took aim with the Speed Force Shotgun and gave the group in the viewing bay a cheery thumbs-up.

(“This looks great, man,” Eric had said, when Cisco had showed him his schematics for replicating the Speed Force Bazooka. “But it could totally be smaller.”

“Could it, though?” Cisco had said very politely through gritted teeth.

“Yeah!” Eric had grabbed the plans and started gesturing enthusiastically. “Looks like there are redundancies here, and here. I bet we could get this down to, say, shotgun size, easy, and then we wouldn’t need such a massive power source.”

Cisco had sighed through his nose, letting a genuine smile spread across his face. “Speed Force Shotgun is more alliterative, anyway.”)

“Alright, Eric,” Rosalyn said into the intercom. “Fire on the count of three. Remember to brace yourself for the kickback. And if you hear me yelling at you about how the dark matter levels are too high in there, shut it down and get into the decontam chamber immediately. No one’s being a daredevil today.”

(“You know this plan of yours is _the_ stupidest thing anyone has ever devised, right?”

Rosalyn had cornered Cisco one night as he was packing up. She stood in the door of the engineering lab, arms crossed and foot tapping. 

“Trust me, Ros, I'm fully aware,” he’d said, rubbing his eyes and thinking about bed, and Harry.

“So you also know,” she had replied in a low voice, stepping closer in a way that might’ve been intimidating if she was so much as an inch over five feet tall, “that you’re the one I’m gonna be _murdering_ if anything happens to her?”

Cisco had laughed softly. “Fair. Though you’d probably have to get in line behind her dad.” That had gotten a chuckle out of her, at least.)

Eric planted his feet firmly and bent his knees. Jesse bit down on the knuckle of her thumb. Rosalyn leaned into the intercom.

“Three, two…. one.”

Eric held down the trigger of the shotgun and a thick coil of lightning exploded out of the barrel. It crackled forward ten, twenty feet, until it hit some wrinkle in space-time that made it happy and _kablammo_ \-- there was an opening in the Speed Force.

Cisco looked right at it through the goggles, even though Matthew had _strongly_ advised against it. Fingers of electricity swirled around clouds of blue energy swirled around the core of the portal, which looked like a galaxy caught in a gale-force wind. Cisco had never thought too carefully about the Speed Force, had always had to see it as a tool to use or an obstacle to overcome, but here -- looking at it, looking into it, knowing it might hold the key to getting his powers back -- he wondered, for the first time, what Barry had seen in there. How it had changed him.

Cisco was shaken from his space-out by Rosalyn blowing past him to check one of the readouts on the console screen.

“Ambient dark matter’s at three-forty gigarads,” she called. “Three-forty-five… three fifty!”

Matthew punched the air. “That’s particle accelerator levels!” they cried. “Right where we need them!”

Jesse clutched Cisco’s arm. She was smiling wide, and it smoothed out all the tension that had been building around her mouth over the last few weeks. 

(“Hey,” Jesse had said to him one day, joining him on the floor of the break room where he had built a nest of couch cushions in which to drink his latte in true comfort.

“Hey,” Cisco had replied warily, not liking the shit-eating grin on her face.

“So you and my dad, huh?”

Cisco had choked on his coffee. Once he could breathe again, he opened his mouth to say something, deny everything probably, but --

“I have eyes, you know,” Jesse had said. “And, uh” -- she cleared her throat loudly -- “ears.”

Cisco had plunged his red, red face into a cushion. “I’m sorry, Jesse,” he’d said in a muffled groan. “You have my full permission to beat me up.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for this _forever_.”

Cisco had straightened up. “For real?”

“Yeah, dum-dum.” She’d nudged him in the shoulder. “You make him beyond happy. He’s lost without you.”

_He’s sad, Cisco. And I don’t think there’s anything_ I _can do about it._

Oh.

Cisco had exhaled, and some tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding had dissipated. He grinned back at Jesse. “So when are _you_ gonna do something about Rosalyn?”

It was Jesse’s turn to blush deeply. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Please. I know mutual pining when I see it.”

“Oh, is _that_ what it was when you took two years to realize my dad was in love with --”

And he’d thrown a pillow at her head, and she’d squealed in laughter, and everything had been okay.)

Eric pressed the trigger again, and the portal fizzed out. As he watched Jesse and Rosalyn do that classic high-five-that-turns-into-hand-holding thing, Cisco wondered whether this was how Harry had felt as he had finally started getting comfortable with Team Flash: surprised, in a nice way, that he was capable of vibrating on their frequency.

\---

The night before Cisco and Jesse were set to depart on their ( _still, just, so ill-advised_ ) mission, Harry insisted on making _pasteles,_ apparently because Cisco had once off-handedly mentioned that he had not-unhappy memories of making them with his family at Christmastime. 

“Harry,” Cisco said, upon walking into a kitchen full of adobo-scented smoke and a very frazzled Harrison Wells, “ _pasteles_ are a bitch to make.”

“As I’m learning,” Harry grumbled into one of the belching pots on the stove.

“That’s why it takes my _whole family,_ like, the _entire_ week leading up to Christmas --”

Harry jumped as one of the pot lids rattled, and broth started bubbling over into the flame. He wrenched the dial around to turn the burner off, and seemed to almost rattle with tension as he leaned against the counter. Cisco came up behind him, wrapped his arms around Harry’s middle, and rested his cheek on his shoulder.

“We’re not going off to war, you know,” he murmured.

Harry put one hand over Cisco’s and reached around with the other to thread through his hair. “Feels like you are.”

Cisco rocked them gently back and forth. “So you decided to make the most labor-intensive dinner in the world to stop yourself from worrying. Hardcore.”

Harry snorted. “I bought banana leaves for you, Ramon. The least you could do is let me have my distractions.”

“Damn, _banana leaves?_ Be still my heart.”

So Cisco helped Harry tame the mess in the kitchen, then turned him and Jesse into his little _pastele_ -rolling minions. They both proved really efficient once they got the hang of it, and by the end of the night they had wrapped, boiled, and demolished a small pile of the things. Cisco savored it all -- his full belly, the spicy warmth in the air and, most importantly, Harry smiling again, if only for a little while.

Later, Cisco led Harry up to bed ( _their bed_ ), and responded in kind when Harry kissed him like it was the end of the world. It wasn’t; Cisco knew what the end of the world looked like. But the knowing didn’t make it much better.

\---

The racetrack stretched out before them, endlessly flat and imposing. Cisco felt very small, literally powerless as he was and clutching the straps on his shoulders like a little kid. A kid with a Speed Force Shotgun and a few other unspeakables in his backpack.

“Remember the date?” Rosalyn barked.

“May nineteenth, 2015,” Jesse said.

“And the address?”

“581 Lakeview,” Cisco recited, a hint of grouch creeping into his voice. Of _course_ Reverb had lived in a fancier part of the city than he did.

“Alright,” Rosalyn said, giving Jesse’s hand a squeeze and Cisco’s shoulder a pat worthy of a Little League coach, “move out.”

Jesse got into position in the center of the track, then leaned forward and wiggled her butt at Cisco. He climbed onto her, piggyback style, and held on for dear life like a baby koala.

“You ready?” Jesse said in his ear.

Cisco took a rattling breath. “Punch it, Chewie.”

Jesse started running, and immediately the air was full of yellow lightning and the blur of the passing world. Cisco tried to focus on breathing and making sure his grip didn’t slip from around Jesse’s neck, but he couldn’t help getting distracted as the streaks in his vision began to change, began to stretch and glow, began to _twist_ \--

_Kessel Run, twelve parsecs,_ Cisco thought wildly, just before there was a sound like a thunderclap and --

the world snapped back into place like a rubber band and --

Jesse skidded to halt in front of a stately apartment building, hulking in the midnight gloom. 

“We’re here.”

Cisco clambered down from her back, blinked until the dizziness went away, and then swung his backpack around to rifle through it. He put the interdimensional extrapolator into the pocket of his jeans, clipped the power-dampening cuffs to his belt loop, and pulled on a straight-up black ski mask. Kind of a cliche. Was definitely gonna do a number on his hair. But no way was Reverb going to see his face.

Finally, he drew out the Shotgun and cocked it. The cocking mechanism didn’t do anything; he and Eric had just added it because it felt cool. And, just as he’d predicted, he needed the feeling.

\---

Cisco had to fight off an almost overwhelming sense of _deja vu_ as they crept through the shadows of Reverb’s apartment. Not because he’d been there before, but because this was _exactly_ how he’d do up his apartment if he had grand-larceny money to blow. He was pretty sure he had lusted over that exact couch in a Pottery Barn catalog once. It was freaky.

They found Reverb asleep and not, thankfully, out pillaging. Except seeing him in this position, sprawled across his king-size bed in a t-shirt and flannel pajama pants, his hair loose and his face relaxed, it was hard all over again for Cisco to think of him as _Reverb,_ and not _me_. He hesitated in the doorway of the bedroom as Jesse crept in, trying to shake this new sense of foreboding out of his head. He barely managed it.

Jesse made a button-clicking gesture at him as she moved to stand over Reverb. Cisco took the extrapolator from his pocket and held it at the ready.

He and Jesse nodded at each other in unison. _Three, two, one._

Cisco clicked the extrapolator. Lightning flashed.

Then, faster than he could process, he and Reverb were stumbling into the pocket dimension. As the breach closed behind them, Cisco turned and caught a glimpse of Reverb’s ( _his_ ) shocked, furious face in the greenish fluorescent light of the room --

and then a concussion of vibrational energy, a flare of blue light, and Cisco and Jesse were flying away from Reverb in opposite directions.

Cisco hit the ground, hard, and all the breath left his body. He groaned, rolled over to retrieve the Shotgun from a couple feet away on the floor, was rewarded with every rib on his right side screaming at him. He managed to shove the Shotgun in his back pocket and push himself up onto his left elbow and saw --

streaks of lightning jumping and dancing around Reverb, knocking his hand aside whenever he raised it to open a breach, landing a punch to his chest, then another to the back of his leg, knocking him down to one knee and --

Reverb using his fall to disguise the fact that he was raising his other arm to let loose another vibrational blast and --

Jesse being knocked to the ground again and Reverb standing over her, ready to strike --

“Hey! Reverb!”

It worked. Reverb turned toward Cisco, horrified confusion in his eyes. “What did you just call me?” he screamed. 

Ah. So the name was only just a gleam in his eye at this point. 

Well. Shit’s out of the bag. Might as well make the most of it.

Teeth gritted against the pain, Cisco dragged himself to his feet. He clutched the cuffs just a little too obviously behind his back, hoping Jesse would see and realize.

Holding Reverb’s gaze in his own, he pulled off the ski mask. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

Reverb’s eyes widened. “What the f --”

And then a flash, and a rush of wind behind Cisco, and Reverb’s wrists were in the cuffs. Jesse hopped out the residual momentum and grinned. “This a dream, Mr. Ramon," she said. "Just a super weird dream.”

Cisco hobbled toward the pair of them, trying not to wince too visibly. Reverb’s eyes flickered between him and Jesse. “I don’t --” he stuttered, his wide-eyed shock tinged with just a bit too much shrewdness for Cisco’s liking. “You, you’re not the Flash, but you -- and _you,_ you’re _me_ \--”

“Like the lady said, man,” Cisco said, “absolutely _bonkers_ dream. Wanna hear what you’re gonna need to do to wake up?”

Reverb didn’t respond, but he shut his mouth and stopped babbling. Cisco took that as a cue to continue.

“I need you to vibe something. Anything you want, I don’t care. But while you’re doing it, I need you to hold onto me and co-vibe.”

“Co--”

“Use my powers to amplify your own. You might have to, uh, reach for mine. Reach real deep.”

Reverb’s eyes narrowed. “You mean… resonate, somehow?”

_Damn. That does sound better than “co-vibe.”_

“Yeah, whatever dumb name you wanna call it. And while we’re doing that, my friend here is going to open” -- Cisco tossed the Shotgun to Jesse -- “let’s just say it’s a breach. You don’t have to worry about it. And then you get to wake up nice and cozy in your bed, and it’ll be like none of this ever happened.”

Cisco felt something wet drip from his nose. He rubbed at it, as inconspicuously as he could.

Blood.

He looked back up at Reverb, who was still watching him suspiciously. Cisco lowered his blood-smeared hand casually, unwilling to betray any weakness.

“Deal?” he asked.

Reverb squared his shoulders. “Deal.”

Cisco let himself exhale quietly. He dragged Reverb into the center of the room, while Jesse walked backward several paces, aiming the Shotgun between the two of them. 

“Stand back!” she called. And then she shot the gun.

Cisco felt the lightning spark past him, heard Reverb’s involuntary “ _shit!_ ” And then there, in front of him and his doppelganger, was the Speed Force, belching sound and energy. Cisco felt it all wash over him, felt it stirring something in his veins the way the injection of dark energy from Cicada’s dagger had, and he thrilled at the realization that this _might just actually work._

He turned back to Reverb, who was facing the Speed Force but watching him out of the corner of his eye. “I’m gonna take the cuffs off you,” Cisco yelled over the roaring waves of force, “and then you take my hand and vibe, alright?”

Reverb nodded. Cisco gripped his wrist and unlatched the cuffs. He held on tight and watched as Reverb raised his other hand to his temple and shut his eyes.

Cisco felt, somewhere way in the back of his brain, the vibrations that Reverb was sending out. It felt familiar, felt so _so_ close to what his own powers had been like, so he closed his eyes and concentrated and ignored the fresh drop of blood sliding down his lip and --

and then his mind _exploded._

It was like a bomb had gone off right next to his ear and all he could hear was ringing, except instead of his ear it was _everything,_ his whole body and brain were vibrating, shattering --

and dimly, very dimly, he registered that he was on the floor and Jesse has thrown a lightning bolt, or maybe herself --

and then, just as suddenly as it had started, the ringing was gone.

Except.

“Cisco, he breached away.” Jesse was kneeling over him. “Oh, god, your nose, I think he hit you with some kind of psychic blast --”

Something was wrong, something was so very, very wrong. Cisco tried to get up, managed to fumble onto his hands and knees, watched as blood dripped dark and sticky from his nose onto the rough stone --

“Cisco?”

And then.

Cisco felt his hand slip _through the floor._

And all at once, he wasn’t in the pocket dimension anymore, except he was, except he was some other place too, some other _places,_ all of them sliding around and into and through each other each time he blinked --

“Cisco!” He heard Jesse scream it from thousands of miles and years away, even as a million versions of her face phased in and out of view --

_It’s happening,_ he thought, or maybe said, or maybe projected out into the nothing he was slipping into. _The timeline. We fucked it up too badly._

But he could barely work up the wherewithal to worry about it, because it felt strangely peaceful, letting his molecules get gently unraveled like strands of yarn… Maybe he was star stuff now, he thought vaguely, with what was left of his neurons… He wouldn’t mind being the stars…

_Harry._

Cisco felt something like a tectonic shift under his hands.

_Nope, not vibing out of existence without saying goodbye to Harry._

He had hands. There was the floor of the pocket dimension, under them.

And there was Jesse, still fuzzy, still too distant, but she was holding his arm and saying _something_ \--

“I’m going to throw you!” she was yelling.

“ _What?_ ” he shouted back -- over the roaring, something was roaring, like a hurricane, like a galaxy --

“ _I’m going to throw you into the Speed Force!_ ” she screamed, and there were tears in her eyes, and one of them fell as Cisco’s arm flickered out of reality again and she lost her grip on him --

_wait wait Jesse why_ \--

“You’re going to die if I don’t do something,” she was sobbing, “but the Speed Force might -- I don’t know for sure, but the dark matter and the dimensional energy might be enough to --”

_realign me maybe or also burn me to a toasty crisp_ \--

“I need your permission.” She reached for his face, scrabbled to find purchase as his body switched on and then off again. “I won’t do it without your permission.”

_No no no no no --_

_her eyes are just Harry’s --_

“Do it,” Cisco heard himself say, in the pocket and across every dimension he was falling through.

And Jesse nodded, and then she threw him.

And suddenly, stillness. 

Stillness and light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy HOWDY this was a fun one to write. Tune in soon to find out what, uh, the fuck.


	5. Reach for the Sky

_You don’t belong here._

_Yeah, no shit, Sherlock._

_You don’t belong here, Cisco. But we’ve been waiting for you, all the same._

\---

Cisco opened his eyes.

He was in his parents’ apartment. There was his mama’s armchair, and Dante’s piano, and his guitar. Golden, overcast light streamed in through the windows, casting long shadows on the spotless floors.

It was all so familiar. It was also all _wrong_.

“Good to see you, Cisco.”

He spun on his heel, heart skipping a beat at the sound of _that voice_ \--

And there was Dante. Standing straight and proud like always, with his pressed shirt and his perfect hair and his stupid, dead face.

“Some welcome party,” Cisco growled, unable to conjure up any feeling but rage.

“We take the forms of those you know best,” the thing that looked like Dante said. “We’ve found that it makes first encounters less… traumatic.”

“So you went with my dead brother? That’s gotta make you pretty stupid, as all-powerful speed gods go.” Cisco balled up his fists, his fury threatening to vibrate right out of him.

_Wait._

Cisco blinked, and then Dante was Iris, sitting in his mama’s chair. “Is this form more pleasing to you?” the Not-Iris said impassively.

Cisco shook his head, barely listening. He could _feel_ again, in a way he hadn’t since Cicada, could feel this imitation of an apartment _vibrating_ at a wild, foreign frequency, one he knew he’d felt before, back when he took Barry --

“What about this?” And then the thing was right in front of Cisco, and it had Harry’s face, nothing human behind the facsimile of his eyes --

“Nope,” Cisco said. “We’re not doing this.”

And he grabbed Not-Harry by the wrists and finally, gloriously _vibed,_ his vision going black and blue with a whine and a _flash flash flash_ \--

And then he saw. Really saw.

Saw the vortex of dark clouds and crashing lightning, swirling around and around and endlessly upward.

Saw what he was touching, a figure made of light and gravity and time and a few forces of nature his _puny mind_ would never be able to comprehend. Saw it shiver blue and bright with the vibrational energy he was pumping into it, even as he felt his brain melt a little with the strain of looking at the thing --

_So much power. Are you going to keep wasting it?_

Cisco gasped and stumbled back. The Speed Force slid away and he was in the apartment again, except it was hazy, desaturated, a little off-kilter, and he swore he could hear something buzzing just under the surface.

“What do you mean, ‘wasting it’?” he said to the thing, which was Barry now.

“You could be so much more,” it said, and was Cisco imagining it, or was it breathing a little harder, looking a little shaken? “You could hold the multiverse together, if you wished. Instead of just being an inconvenience to us.”

“Dude, I’ve gotten the ‘together, we can rule the galaxy’ spiel before.” Cisco flexed his fingers, drew energy up into the spaces between them. “I just wanna go home.”

A blink, and Not-Barry was gone, replaced by a Not-Caitlin sitting primly on the piano bench, her face stony.

“That won’t be possible,” the being said in her voice. “You have broken the timeline, flaunted our laws, betrayed us by helping Allen to escape. There must be consequences.”

“Oh, okay, you’re just looking for another sap to put in your prison,” Cisco said. “Y’all are exhausting, you know that?”

He squeezed his eyes shut so that he wouldn’t have to look at Not-Caitlin, so he could listen for the buzzing of the Speed Force. He could _almost_ hear it, thought he might be able to reach for it if he could just --

_there --_

_flash_ the apartment dissolved again, and the wind was rushing and the impossible being was glowing with power and speed in front of him, and Cisco stretched out a hand and didn’t think, just _shattered_ through the substance and not-substance of it --

and it _screamed_ in frustration, or maybe even pain --

Holy shit. “You don’t like that, do you?” Cisco said, with more disbelief in his voice than bravado, and loosened his grip. He felt sweat drip down his face, an ache spread up his arms.

_You WILL stay._

“Send me home.” Cisco gritted his teeth, gathered his remaining strength, and vibed at the thing again. It twisted and writhed.

_Even if we allowed it, you could not go back. Your body fractured along with the timeline! You would die!_

“So stop whining about it and let me _fix it!_ ” Cisco bellowed, letting the thing go with one last grinding pulse of energy.

If an extradimensional being could register surprise, this one did. It stilled a bit, started vibrating a little different.

_You want us to grant you access to the timelines._

“Yeah, that,” Cisco panted. 

_Even a breacher of your caliber would almost certainly be destroyed._

“Better than spending eternity with your wibbly-wobbly ass.”

_You would burn out of existence. Or you would be changed._

Cisco laughed, somewhere between bitterness and exhilaration. “Nothing I haven’t dealt with before, man. Bring it on.”

The Speed Force stared at him, or it would have if it had eyes. 

And then they were back in the apartment. Except there was nothing to see but white walls and gray floor, like the illusion couldn’t be bothered to fully form anymore. And in the middle of the room was the thing, looking like the barest suggestion of Cisco’s _abuela_. 

It stepped forward and touched his temples, with hands that looked wrinkled but felt smooth and artificial on his skin.

 _Reach out,_ it said in its lightning-and-hurricanes voice. _Let yourself fall into the multiverse._

Cisco closed his eyes once more. Felt dark energy flood into his pores. Gathered what felt like entire dimensions in his hands.

 _If you survive it, we will pull you out,_ the Speed Force whispered. _Good luck, Cisco._

Cisco fell.

\---

And then he was _everywhere._

He felt the frequency of every particle of matter, the wavelength of every moment in time as they flowed in front of him, over him, inside him. He heard a million billion Big Bangs, saw stars blinking in and out of existence like fireflies, touched the delicate webs of dark matter that stretched through and between universes.

It was too much, and also nothing at all.

Cisco gave himself a second, a century, the lifespan of a galaxy to take it all in. And then he clenched his fist (or maybe it was a binary star system), and what he thought to himself rang out across everything that ever was or would be:

_To infinity, and beyond. For real, this time._

\---

He put Reverb back. Plucked him from his early-morning havoc-wreaking, returned him to the nighttime, and let him sleep, unaware that anything unusual had happened.

Mostly. Months later, when a certain evil speedster asked him how he would like to rule his and every other Central City, something would stir at the back of Reverb’s mind. Not a memory, a feeling. A vibe. And he would follow that feeling to Earth-1, where he would be surprised at how little he was surprised to find a man with his face and his powers.

_I knew you were coming. I’ve been watching you, Vibe._

The timeline was happy with that. It wasn’t quite right, but it was good enough. 

\---

Cisco put Jesse back, too. Carried her from where she was sitting vigil in the pocket dimension, smoothed out the crescent-shaped cuts where she’d been digging her fingernails into her palms. Deposited her in her living room, where Harry had been standing by the window and cleaning his glasses for far too long.

Cisco watched as their twin expressions of shock turned to relieved, joyous tears. And when they had finished clinging to each other and started looking around frantically, his name on their lips as if they could conjure him from the air by asking loudly enough, Cisco touched Harry on the shoulder. 

Well, not touched, not in the conventional sense. But Harry felt it all the same, and he gasped, and he smiled with his eyes toward the sky.

\---

_What about Nora?_

The Speed Force paused, like it needed to think about it. _No, you may leave the West-Allen girl where she is. She has… set something in motion that we wish to see to its conclusion._

_Cool. Can I go now?_

_You’ve done well, Cisco. One day, you will return to us. It is inevitable._

Across all of space and time, Cisco thought of the way Harry looked at him like he could do anything. The way he kissed him. The way his eyes reflected the light of the setting sun.

_Nah. I know inevitable when I see it._

\---

So Cisco tumbled out of a portal and landed in the kitchen at Harry’s feet. Again. Luckily, he was awake this time, so he could make soothing noises as the man flew into a full-fledged tizzy.

“Are you -- are you okay, did you --” Harry seemed to need to touch every part of Cisco to make sure he was real: arms, waist, hands, hair. “Jesse said you were --”

“In the Speed Force, yeah --”

“-- about to _die_ again, _Cisco_.” Harry’s hands landed on either side of his face, and his eyes flicked frantically back and forth between each of Cisco’s as if he was making sure there was nothing there that shouldn’t be.

“Hey. Hey,” Cisco murmured, running his hands down Harry’s chest. “I didn’t, okay? Or, well, maybe I kinda did, in a way, it’s a long-ass story --”

“When I, I _felt_ you, before, it felt like you were -- but then the feeling was gone and I worried that --”

“Harry.” Cisco put his hands over Harry’s on his cheeks. “Feel that? I’m here. I’m okay.”

Harry stopped fluttering and looked at him, still and wide-eyed. He took a few shallow breaths, ran his thumbs over Cisco’s cheekbones. Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he rasped. And they stood like that for a moment, until Cisco remembered the thing he absolutely needed to get out of the way before anything else went down.

“Oh!” He stepped back and took one of Harry’s hands in his. “There _is_ something I need to show you.”

“What --”

And without so much as a breach or a vibe or a _pop_ of displaced air, Cisco and Harry were standing in the engineering lab ( _their lab_ ) on Earth-1. Harry jumped and spun around to take it all in; it was dark, still too early for anyone to be there, and dusty with disuse after Cisco’s weeks of absence, but still unmistakably the place they both remembered.

Harry looked down at Cisco, an awestruck question on his lips. But before he could say anything, Cisco snapped his fingers (not because he had to, just for dramatic effect) and they were back in the kitchen.

“Ramon!” Harry cried, his hands coming to rest on Cisco’s ribs lightly, not like he was fragile but like he was vibrating almost too fast to touch. “You can teleport! How?”

“Uh, Speed Force shenanigans?” Cisco said, a little breathless at the way Harry was looking at him. “I was sort of everywhere at once for a minute there. Guess it rubbed off.” He pitched his voice deep and dramatic. “ _Phenomenal cosmic power._ ”

Harry laughed then, and the weight of the trillion questions he hadn’t known how to ask lifted, leaving just one:

“Can I -- can I kiss you now, is that --”

A colossal smile broke over Cisco’s face. “Yeah, man, what the _fuck_ are you waiting for?”

Having just come back from being granted dominion over the whole of existence, Cisco might have expected something as relatively small as a kiss to feel less than consequential. But thank God he was wrong, because as Cisco leapt up and wrapped his legs around Harry’s waist and his arms around Harry’s neck, and as Harry made a little “ _ho_ ” of surprise before gripping Cisco tight and kissing him like he was _everything,_ all the time and all the words in the multiverse wouldn’t have been enough to describe how absolutely _awesome_ that kiss was.

\---

Cisco found Team Flash in the Cortex. Iris was sitting at the console, looking tired, and the others were standing around her with their backs to him, discussing something in low voices. So Iris saw him first, through the forest of Barry and Ralph’s limbs. 

“ _Cisco?_ ” she shouted across the room, her voice breaking.

Everyone else spun around, mouths dropping open. And there was a flash of light and Barry’s hug hit him like a speeding truck, except Cisco didn’t care because they were both too busy laughing and crying. And then everyone else piled on until Cisco was crushed in a tangled, snotty knot of his friends, his family, his home.

“We thought you were dead, Cisco,” Caitlin sniffled softly in his ear.

“I know.” He blinked tears out of his eyes and onto the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t _ever_ be sorry,” she said, squeezing him even tighter, “for coming back to us.”

They all stood there for who knew how long, rocking back and forth and drying each other’s faces on their sleeves. Finally, Cisco said, “There’s something you guys have gotta see.”

The others took slow, reluctant steps back. Cisco spread his hands with a flourish, grinned gleefully at their apprehensive faces, and then --

He was across the room. The others barely had time to cry out in surprise before he was behind the dry-erase board, then on the ceiling (just for a second because _whoops, yeah, gravity still applies_ ), then back where he’d started.

Barry laughed his wonderstruck laugh, Ralph’s eye twitched like his brain was breaking, and Caitlin sprinted for some medical device or other.

“Cisco!” Barry exclaimed. “What --”

“The Speed Force,” Cisco replied, and Barry’s smile slipped a little. “It’s okay, mostly, I’ll tell you later --”

Caitlin was back, running one of her tricorder things up and down in front of him, her eyes getting wider and wider with every beep and click. “These readings, they’re -- I don’t even know what to make of them --”

Cisco put his hand on hers and slowly made her lower the scanner. “I promise, I’ll explain everything,” he said, “but first, there’s something you have to know about Cicada. When he stabbed me, the dagger sucked all the dark matter out of my DNA. And if it did the same thing to all the other metas he’s killed --”

“The dagger is probably storing it,” Barry said grimly. “Like a bomb.”

“ _That_ wasn’t in the museum either,” Nora muttered.

“Cisco,” Iris said, her brow creasing the way it did when she was having one of her fantastic ideas, “if you can teleport without breaching, do you think you could vibe a person without touching something of theirs?”

Another grin spread across Cisco’s face, slow and electric. “Let’s find out.”

\---

Harry and Jesse only spilled their coffee a little when Cisco popped back into their kitchen the next morning.

“You couldn’t send a note through first, Ramon?” Harry grumbled, the smile around his eyes kind of ruining his attempt at grouchiness.

“What am I, a Victorian _lady of society_ with my _calling cards?_ No thank you.” Cisco grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and crunched down on it right in Harry’s beautiful face. “It won’t kill you to be a little spontaneous from time to time.”

Harry wrinkled his nose at him. “I happen to be in the middle of _breakfast_ with my _daughter_ \--”

“Nope, I was just leaving,” Jesse said brightly, grabbing an entire box of toaster waffles from the freezer.

“Jesse, you don’t have to --”

“Just! Leaving!” Lightning flash. Door slam. Harry huffed out an amused, adoring chuckle.

“So,” Cisco said around another bite of apple. “The Cicada thing is well on its way to being taken care of.”

Harry leaned against the island and sipped his coffee. “That’s good.”

“And Caitlin did a bunch of tests, and her expert diagnosis is that I am ‘totally fine, just ten thousand times more of a badass.’”

“Snow didn’t say that.”

“I’m paraphrasing.”

Harry’s eyes twinkled over the rim of his mug, and suddenly any amount of space between them was too much. The apple rolled away across the floor as Cisco closed the distance, gripping the edge of the counter on either side of Harry’s hips. Harry just put down his coffee and looked at him with that almost-smile.

“So it’s looking like all my loose ends are getting tied up,” Cisco murmured, letting his breath skate across Harry’s throat. “Except this one.”

“I was under the impression,” Harry said, an extra rasp in his voice all of a sudden, “that your newfound powers had rendered any difficulties we might have had moot.”

“Well, yeah. No such thing as long-distance when your boyfriend is an omnipresent space god.” Cisco pressed a kiss into the crook of Harry’s neck, heard Harry’s breath hitch. “But I know how you need to have everything planned out, babe, so I thought we could --”

“Hmm. Not sure I like that.”

“What, ‘Omnipresent Space God’?” Cisco whispered, tracing Harry’s ear with the tip of his nose. “Because no way am I letting that one go. I’m gonna program Siri to call me that, everyone’s gonna have to make it my contact name in their phones --”

“No, you assnoggin.” Harry buried his nose in Cisco’s hair, let his fingers trail under Cisco’s shirt and up his back. “I thought you wanted to be _spontaneous_.”

“Well, yeah, sometimes,” Cisco said as ghosted his lips down Harry’s jawline. “But there’s still gonna be a lot of coordination involved. Like, how many days a week can you conceivably make me French toast? Are you gonna come hang out with Team Flash every other day or every third day? Should I --”

Harry drew back an inch. A tiny frown formed between his eyebrows. “Wait, Team Flash? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Cisco raised his hands to the sides of Harry’s face, threading his fingers into his hair and rubbing gentle circles into his temples with his thumbs. “They all miss you, stupid,” he said, with as much tenderness as he could muster. “Just because you’re not on the team anymore doesn’t mean you’re not still part of the family.”

The lines of Harry’s face softened. “Alright,” he said, pulling Cisco close and dropping a kiss to the top of his head. “It sounds like what you’re proposing is less of a schedule and more… balance.”

Cisco grinned against the neck of Harry’s sweater. “If you’re trying to get me to admit that you had the right idea all along --”

“I would _never,_ Mr. Space God.”

At that, Cisco finally dragged Harry down by the collar into a real kiss, long and slow and brain-melting.

“Please don’t tell me,” Harry growled against his mouth, “that the ‘space god’ thing is an _actual_ turn-on for you.”

“No. Maybe. Shut up,” Cisco said, punctuating each word with another kiss. 

“You’re impossible, Ramon.”

“I love you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading, and finishing, this story! It's meant so much to me to see your lovely comments and reactions. Check out my page for a couple other dumb fluffy fics, or find me on Tumblr at she-is-the-doctor for more useless nerd content.


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